


The Everybody Who’s Nobody, the Nobody Who’s Everybody

by Deafen_the_Satellites, Femme_Daltia



Series: Still How the Strong Survive [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 9/11, Americana, Folklore, Gen, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, New York City History Feels, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Stucky if you squint, World trade center, buckynat if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 01:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12783528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deafen_the_Satellites/pseuds/Deafen_the_Satellites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femme_Daltia/pseuds/Femme_Daltia
Summary: How do you grieve for a national identity born after you died and that died before you were reborn? How do you eulogize the essence of a stranger?





	The Everybody Who’s Nobody, the Nobody Who’s Everybody

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Ballad for Americans_
> 
> This time my ever patient beta, Femme_Daltia, gets a well-deserved co-author credit. Don’t get us going on folklore and the creation of myths and legends. Or, if that is your jam, do. Just be forewarned. It will not be a short discussion.
> 
> A note on chronology: This story is chronologically first in the _Still How the Strong Survive_ series however the background context for the characters and their specific post-Civil War situation is more fully explained in the following fic, _Honey, If You Stay I'll Be Forgiven_ While this story functions fine as a standalone fic, readers are encouraged to keep reading in the series for additional information!

Natasha took Bucky and Steve to visit Ground Zero one night in late August, a few weeks ahead of the fifteenth anniversary. It was hot, and a pleasant breeze blew off the waterfalls tumbling endlessly down into the square basins below, glowing gold and ghostly in the dark like twin _will o’ the wisps._ Or _Liam an tSoip_ as his Ma would have called them.  

They’d spent the early evening ambling around Lower Manhattan, through Battery Park, looking out over the harbor.  Steve remembered when that harbor had been packed like a parking lot full of ships coming out of the Navy Yard, all waiting to be sent out under the Verrazano and off to the Front.  It was emptier now, vast and peaceful at sunset in a way it had never been back in his day.  Cleaner too, from what he’d read.

He’d looked north as they’d wandered, to the high rises and West Side Highway, sad to see that Little Syria was long gone.  It had been in the process of being torn down when he’d left for the War, but it bothered him that so few people recalled that the largest Arab neighborhood in the entire country had once been located so close to the future site of the World Trade Center.  He’d known families on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn whose cousins had lived in Little Syria. Good people, long gone now, swept away by a tide of shifting neighborhoods and waves of new immigrants come to replace them. 

They’d saved visiting the World Trade Center memorial for last, arriving under the cover of night, hoping to avoid the tourists, the curious daytime eyes that believed that if Steve – no Captain America – was at Ground Zero, then it had to mean something.  That there had to be a _reason_ or a press event or something beyond the simple act of a kid from Brooklyn come to pay his respects, trying to understand how to miss something he’d never known. 

How do you seek contrition at an unfamiliar altar? How do you eulogize the essence of a stranger?

Steve has been awake in this brave new world for a few years now, had even lived in New York City for some of that time, and yet this was his first visit to the memorial. He’d received a formal invitation to the annual commemoration every year since he’d been thawed-out of course, even when he’d been living in D.C., but he’d turned them all down. They’d invited him with… expectations. What those were exactly, well he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he knew that they _needed_ something, not from him exactly, but from Captain America. Grief? Outrage, maybe? Commiseration, perhaps? The problem was that _Steve_ , was at his best off-script, off-the-cuff and from the heart. But his feelings toward the events of fifteen years ago were…nebulous at best. And any performance he stood up and gave to the amassed family members and first responders and pundits would be just that…a performance. The bereaved deserved more than that from someone they held as a hero and the self-serving didn’t warrant the chance to exploit it.  But mostly, he was tired of the performance itself, of being symbolically useful to every group that wanted legitimacy in the eyes of the American people.

Some days he wasn’t sure which was worse; the uncertainty of their new routine (wake up, call parole officer, make sure Bucky called his, repeat the agreed upon itinerary for the day as communicated during the end of day call the night before, say good morning to the friendly neighborhood spooks who tailed them – honestly that could be fun if Natasha was along. Her incredulity at their lack of professional subtly was amusing – spend days arguing with lawyers and government representatives in this post-Berlin, post-Siberia, post-Raft and quite possibly post-Avengers world they now found themselves in) or the fact that it was an Election year. He had turned down offers to appear at campaign rallies. For multiple candidates. 

All told, he was done with Captain America but he doubted the country was ever going to be done with him.

They were only here tonight at Natasha’s insistence. She had started accompanying them on their excursions around the city earlier in the summer, ostensibly to act as a sort of unofficial/official chaperon as they reacquainted Bucky with the present metropolis, make sure they weren’t assassinated on the steps of the court house or took it upon themselves to disappear from their admittedly loose brand of custody. In execution though, Nat spent most of her time on duty making old-man jokes, quoting movies neither Steve nor Bucky had seen and conning them into buying her various street foods while letting them drag her down memory lane.  Steve had to admit, these walks were a lot less painful than the ones he’d taken on his own a few years earlier.  Less lonely for one.

Still, he had initially resisted this particular trip. _“Nat, no, that is the last place I want to be recognized. I just don’t have it in me to be Cap right now.”_

_“It’ll be fine,” she’d reassured him. “With your beard and baseball cap you’re less recognizable at night. If anyone comes up to us, I’ll handle it.”_

And well, he’d stalled and dragged his feet as they’d made their slow, circumspect trek to the memorial. But here they were, nevertheless, supplicants come at last to pay homage at this tomb of America in the 20th century. Or was it more apt to think of it as the creche of the 21st and they three pilgrims come from foreign lands to bare it witness?

 _But what gifts do we have to offer?_ Steve thought darkly as they walked closer to the pool at the southern end of the complex, the day’s heat escaping from the paving stones beneath his feet. Steve suppressed a shiver as they stopped a few inches from one of the black railings, lined with names, circumscribing the precipice before them.

Natasha had said once that people talked about feeling the Void down here, feeling the absence of what used to be, in the footprint of those flooded foundations.  But Steve felt that everywhere these days, a wound only scabbed over by the thin skein of the City’s modern skin. He was struggling to recall what had been here before, what to him seemed like far less than fifteen years ago.

“Is it weird for you?”  Natasha asked from his right, the first to break their contemplative silence.  “It’s weird for me.  It was a worldwide event so I remember it even though I didn’t play for this team then.” 

She exhaled heavily.  “The anniversaries are always hard for Fury. S.H.E.I.L.D really never saw it coming. Can’t imagine what it felt it for you…when you found out that is.” 

What did it feel like?  He’d been hearing about it ever since he came out of the ice.  It was the underlying commentary in every magazine and every news special he’d come across.  All the ones he’d avoided interviews for, because he was tired of playing the role. Tired of being made to spout another script, tired of selling yet another product, of having his face slapped on to a fictional brand of American reality.

It was as if his rebirth was a way for the country “to be good again”, to absolve itself of the sins of the last century, its moral ambiguity, its cynicism.  As if ‘the Good Old Days’ were shot in black and white instead of a million nuanced colors. Peggy had said they’d mucked it up, the chance the War had given them to make a better history than what had come before. Maybe it wasn’t so strange then that the inheritors of that promised ‘better history’ should be so fixated on the romance of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’. That in the wake of national trauma they’d longed to return to a kind of purity and innocence that was completely alien to what Steve himself remembered, to what Steve himself did or said or was.

The terrorist attacks on September 11th were a fresh wound on a country that had long believed itself recovered from the afflictions of the Depression and the wars of the early 20th century, whose scars had faded with time and in memory. But those old hurts still ached within him in a way that 9/11 did not.  He’d meant it as more than glib dismissal when he’d told Natasha that it was difficult to find people with shared life experiences. Even the elderly veterans Steve had met in the years since his return looked at him with an uncomplicated glow cast from past horizons. Their own lives reflected in a rearview mirror, distorted by the meteoric ups and downs, booms and recessions, progression and paranoia built up over seven decades. And Steve, a shining figure left abandoned by the roadside, appearing closer than he was, the lens not adjusting for the miles in between.

It hurt that they preferred him there too, a fixed point, waving in the distance through their rear window.  Ironic too, given that they’d resented him back then for what he’d really been, a matinee hero in tights.  Even when the Howling Commandos were at their peak of popularity, even when the missions they’d run had been critical and successful, he had never fit in with the rest of the troops. He understood.  He was a test-tube soldier with a fake rank. He had run to the army to do his part in the War, but he hadn’t worked for what he got, hadn’t earned it the way so many of the unnamed, unremembered men and women had.

So, for Steve, 9/11 was a strange code word, a totemic short-hand invoked when trying to summarize a half century of culture, politics and history that he was still struggling to catch up on.  9/11 was a summary for a life he’d never had, of mistakes and egotism and pain that he hadn’t earned either. What _could_ he say about it?  What insight, what inspiration could he give to those who had? He could no more speak to their experiences than to those of the G.I. back in 1943.

“It’s…weird. I know objectively that something massive and horrible happened to my city.  I’m sad and angry about what it did to this place, these people and the absolute shit storm that happened afterward…that’s still happening.”

He shifted uneasily.  He knew he should feel more, should say something more reverential. But it was hard when, in context, everything felt like a Captain America soundbite. 

“It’s why we’re here, at any rate,” he continued, “the Avengers as some post 9/11 fallout response. Our origins shaped by its aftermath.”

“Mmm…Tony would have existed even without 9/11. Pretty sure there were war profiteers on the plain outside Troy.” Natasha replied bluntly. 

“Best horse money could buy” added Bucky.   

Steve snorted. Bucky had spent years picking up and putting down the Illiad, never quite reading it through all the way. But he wasn’t above inserting references to it here and there to remind people he had read it. 

“But, you got to wonder though, would Tony have had such a major change of heart, pun not intended, by the way, if there hadn’t been a cave in Afghanistan waiting for him? I’d like to believe, yes…but, hell, would he even still be alive? And without him would…” Steve couldn’t bring himself to finish that thought, to contemplate just how much worse things could have been if he’d come out of the ice to a world that hadn’t forged Iron Man. God, how fucked up was that.

“Nat, you gotta understand,” Steve continued after a moment to collect himself, “Pearl Harbor still feels like a handful of years ago to me, Europe was a giant minefield just yesterday. “

“So, this…” he said, jerking his head in a vague, sharp gesture encompassing the complex around them, “…all just feels like part of the same battle, the next atrocity in the line-up. Like the War just kept going on without me, ya know?  The only thing that changed is that people found new ways to exact old wrongs against each other.” 

Sometimes he felt so tired for it all.

 _What use was I in the end?_ he thought but didn’t say.

“So, I don’t know, Nat, it just doesn’t connect the same way for me. Not the way it should anyway.”

And what do you do with that? How do stand up and put that in a speech?

He looked out over the yawning chasm of the falls and then down at the railing in front of him, skimming the list of engraved names. Names of people born after he died who died before he was reborn.  People who could very well have been among those who talked about the ‘good old days’ that never existed, who waxed poetic about places and experiences that could have only existed after the War. Things that were themselves now gone or dying out, vanishing like morning dew under the burn of the 21st Century sunrise.   

“It’s like the War Memorials we saw as kids” Bucky ventured, sidling over on Steve’s left, the shifting heat of him through the mist a warm, ghostly presence at his side. “The earlier war, I mean. The Great War. It happened when we were babies so by the time we were old enough to know what it was it felt like a long time ago, ancient history, ya know? But for everyone around us it had just happened. We grew up being told that the memorials meant something and we knew they did but it felt…different.” 

“Yeah,” replied Steve. He looked over at Bucky, appreciating any moment of connection, of memory that came from him.  “That’s…that’s exactly what it feels like.”

The railings in front of them were covered in the names of strangers that nevertheless felt eerily familiar, even though he knew that they had never dwelt in the same decades.  He recalled a war movie he’d watched with Sam once, _Big Red One_.  

 

                                   **Johnson:** Would you look at how fast they put up the names of all our guys who got killed?

                                   **The Sergeant:** That's a World War One memorial.

                                   **Johnson:** But the names are the same.

                                   **The Sergeant:** They always are.

 

It’s always the same damn names.  The people who never go home. From the Front. From work.

“When they were digging out the site to build this memorial and the museum they found a ship.” Natasha said, jolting Steve out of his sullen meditation.  “It was the hull of an 18th Century wreck; broken in two when they built the slurry wall to keep the Hudson River from flooding the foundations of the World Trade Center.  It was preserved in the silt like it was just waiting to re-emerge, a time capsule from another bygone tragedy.”

“Good to know you aren’t the only relic being accidentally unearthed, huh?” Bucky elbowed Steve playfully. Steve snorted but it was something to think about.  They were standing on landfill where once, long before Steve and Bucky had been born, the river had freely flowed, past docks and pilings and waterfront warehouses.  Eventually the island had been built out, expanding further and further into the river, until the original shoreline had been completely covered-over and erased from all waking memory.

The ship, a vestige of the industry that had founded this city, was swallowed up by man’s relentless progress across sea and shore and forgotten, only to be rediscovered after ships of the air had destroyed what time and hubris had built around it.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, Steve had been told, more than had been evacuated from Dunkirk, had fled Lower Manhattan ahead of the collapse by boat, modern successors of the ship buried beneath the foundations of the Towers, ferrying them to safety, returning to the river once again.   

The city changed and re-invented itself but always came back to its past. 

“Radio Row.” Steve remembered suddenly. “I think that was a few blocks from here.”

Bucky thought for a moment “Yeah, I- yeah I think you’re right. It would’ve cut across the northern part of this plaza, up that-a-way” He gestured ahead of them.

Steve turned and explained to Natasha, “There was a whole bunch of shops, I guess they’d be called electronics stores now, that ran for a few blocks just north of here. You could find everything you needed to build radios, tinker, repair. The stores were packed full of merchandise and there were some where you couldn’t even get into the store there was so much stuff. They did business out on the street and the storekeep, or usually, the storekeep’s cranky grandpa, would go in and find what you were looking for and bring it out.”

“It was so loud,” Bucky laughed, “The whole neighborhood practically vibrated from every store playing music full blast to be heard over the competition. Even when you bought something, you’d get yelled at by the guy behind the counter for being annoying and making them look for things.”

“It took three consecutive trips to Radio Row to find the right tube to repair my Ma’s old wireless. Damn part must have been out of production by ’39.”

“Hey, we found it eventually and I got the set working, didn’t I?” Bucky teased, mock-affronted, before pausing, suddenly somber, “Heard FDR’s address after Pearl Harbor on that set.”

“Yeah,” said Steve, tracing over a name on the railing. Sobering once again at the reminder, December 7th, 1941 the closest he could probably come to understanding this place. “I remember.”

“Did you know there was a fourth plane?” Natasha began all too casually, breaking the settled silence.  She addressed Bucky, continuing as if for his benefit, but there was poignancy to her tone that needled uneasily at something in Steve. This was more than just a subject change. Steve looked away uncomfortably. He knew about Flight 93 of course, knew about how people talked about it. And damn, leave it to Natasha to circle back around and cut to the heart of the matter. Should’ve known, Nat rarely did anything without purpose, rarely let a wound go un-lanced. She’d wheedled and nudged until she’d gotten him here, the one place in New York he’d least wanted to go, brought Bucky in tow, piqued his curiosity, gotten them reminiscing until Steve was easy and eager to please. Asked him what these sad, hallowed holes in the ground meant to him, let him believe that was the worst she had to say, the deepest she would prod. That her question hadn’t been preamble to something more.  

“It crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Well, it didn’t crash.  The passengers stormed the cockpit and took it down.  Took it down, away from a major city, before it could reach its target.” 

“Nat, don’t” Steve shut his eyes, leaning forward on the railing, his spread fingers curling into fists. Like it or not the trajectory of this conversation was heading right where he least wanted it to land. How long had she been planning this?

But, Nat wasn’t deliberately cruel. And whatever and however barbed her means, her ends meant well. This was how Nat showed kindness, this was how she took care of her friends, Steve reminded himself. Would probably have to keep reminding himself until he felt less ambushed.

“The comparison was made at the time.” Nat continued, ignoring him. “It got overshadowed by the magnitude of that day but I’m sure you’ve seen them, the pictures, the video clips, all those shield’s left at the crash site in Shanksville, at the Pentagon, at the pop-up memorials around the country. Kids’ drawings, keychains, decorated Frisbees. There was even a New Yorker cartoon. Generations who grew up hearing about the Valkyrie knew how to honor its legacy. “

Natasha was looking at Steve now, addressing him directly.

“The Brits like to believe that Arthur sleeps, waiting to return when he is needed the most.  The day you augered in to the North Atlantic was the day you granted Captain America immortality. Captain American became more than a man or a hero, he became a legend. And, well, you know what they say, ‘ _heroes get remembered but legends never die’_ , and all that right? No? It’s from a—nevermind. What I’m trying to say is that, fifteen years ago, on the day he was needed the most, Captain America rose again from the water and came back.”

“But I wasn’t here, Nat!” Steve exclaimed, frustrated with this conversation, with the ugly thoughts that had dogged him all evening, growing in strength under the encroaching shadow of Ground Zero. “Everyone tries to tie me to that day but I wasn’t here! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! I want this, all of this” he waved his hand over the plaza, “to mean something to me. To matter.  But it wasn’t something I was around for. I’m living in the aftermath of the worst day in this city’s life and everyone wants to paint me into this story but I couldn’t do anything to stop it, to help.  I left here to fight bullies.  Should’ve stayed put.  New York didn’t need Captain America.  He was just a propaganda tool to entertain people into buying War Bonds.”

He gazed out over the waters of the southern pool toward the glow of the northern.   “Captain America was newsreel fodder and Saturday afternoon adventure serials.  I was just a third-rate actor too pathetic to make it out of Brooklyn on my own. But no-one seems to want to remember that.” 

“Really?” asked Bucky.  Steve knew that tone of voice. It was the one he’d always used when he was letting Steve argue himself into a corner.  Steve grit his teeth, could practically hear Bucky’s cocked eyebrow. No wonder Natasha wanted to do this now, all the better to tag-team him.

Natasha shook her head. “But that was the point Steve. You were just a kid from Brooklyn. You were nobody and so you could be everybody. There was a photo of a guy working on the pile at Ground Zero in the weeks after. He painted your shield on his helmet. He grew up in Brooklyn, after his parents moved here from Vietnam. He was Captain America. There was a team of therapists who operated out of St. Paul’s Chapel, a few blocks from here, when it was being used as a rest site for all those working on recovery efforts. Someone gave them t-shirts with little shields. They were Captain America.”

“You know”, Natasha exhaled slowly after she’d let her point hang there for a second, a slight whistle catching behind her teeth, a subtle tell that what she was about to say was grudgingly personal and vaguely embarrassing. “When I first joined S.H.I.E.L.D, Fury gave me this kids’ book, a treasury of indigenous mythology and American folk lore.  Captain America was in there, along with Coyote, Rip van Winkle, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, and La Llorona. Weird collection I know, _definitely_ a bit colonialist now that I think about it. I was unimpressed to say the least. Fury though, he said that this country was a culture that had created a rich mythology in its short existence. That the advantage of being a nation with a notoriously short attention span, is that it didn’t take long for someone or something to become a legend and for that legend to become ingrained in the identity of the country.

I think, what he was trying to tell me, in the most indirect way possible of course, was that I could become my own person. That I could create my own mythology, separate from the narrative that the Red Room had written for me.  That… actually meant a lot to me. What you represent, your legend, means a lot to people too, Steve.

Our legends, our collective mythology, they teach us things, embody our ideals, tells us that we can be more than we are. So, so what if the Office of War Information co-opted the SSR’s project and created Captain America?  Santa-Claus sells Coca-Cola and Paul Bunyan and Babe spent far more time decorating Route 66 than splitting logs, but you can’t say that they don’t also inspire people to be kind, or generous, or adventurous, or bold in the face of adversity.”

“Never think you didn’t matter, Steve”, said Bucky softly, the steadying warmth of his body shifting a bit closer, a whisper of a touch against his arm. “You can drop the shield any time you want. The most important thing you did was inspire other people to pick it up when the time was right.”

Steve looked over at Bucky, who was watching him with a fond smile, one that reminded Steve so much of the old days that for a moment his heart ached to bursting.

With a sigh, Steve slumped forward, his clenched hands relaxing and unfurling against the solid, black expanse of the railing, his fingers sliding into the etched grooves like roots into furrows. The tension he’d been carrying with him all evening draining away between one breath and the next, dissipating like mist into the abyss below.  For a few precious minutes, Steve allowed himself simply to drift, weightless and hollow, gently buffeted by the breeze, transfixed by the multitudinous flecks of refracted light dancing across the polished stone. His Ma had liked to tell him tales of the Old Country too,

 _The_ _Liam an tSoip may lead you astray and down dark paths my boy, but sometimes they also lead you right back round.’_

Steve huffed and looked up, exasperated and fond. “Okay. Okay…but was it _really_ necessary to drag me all the way out here just to tell me, what? That I should be proud of Captain America…that I can stop…that I can—“

“Would you have listened otherwise?” Natasha interjected, one eyebrow artfully quirked. “You always seem to insist on the hard way, Rogers."

"You have no idea..." he heard Bucky mutter under his breath. Steve groaned, the tips of his ears flushing red despite himself. 

Self-satisfied, Natasha moved closer, until she stood nearly flush against Steve’s other side, her face caught in soft relief as she tipped it toward the light, her ruddy hair aflame. “But, yeah Steve, that is what we’re trying to tell you. You can be anybody you want to be. It’s not just spy advice.” She said, the usual sharp point to her smile blunted. “You don’t owe anybody anything. Not your feelings, not your time, not even Captain America. But there is a whole nation of people out there who owe it to you to keep the best of Captain America alive. Tights and all.”

Steve twitched, surprised, at the abrupt warmth and weight that braced itself against his back as Bucky slide his hand around to rest against his shoulder. Gently rolling his thumb in small, steady circles, just as he had on a thousand and one nights before, through back spasms and asthma attacks and nausea. Bucky sang softly into the night, “ _We nobodies who are anybody believe it. We anybodies who are everybody have no doubts._ “

“No one knows that song anymore,” Steve laughed weakly, blinking back tears, too spent to bother fighting down the sudden emotion that had risen in him. _These two._ He melted back a little into Bucky’s steady embrace, against Natasha’s comforting presence **.**

“Shame,” responded Bucky. “Robeson could make anything sound good”

All three stood together, watching the water tumble down and down, never ceasing. 

“Do you think Erksine thought of all that when he picked you?” Bucky asked. 

“Erksine knew exactly what he was doing,” answered Natasha. “He named it Project Rebirth, after all.” 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> • Between the 1880s and the Immigration Act of 1924, Little Syria, in the area north of Battery Park and south of Chambers St. was the largest Arab community in the United States, made up of people from present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. The neighborhood was largely razed to build the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in the 1940s. Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, not far from Steve’s 616 home, was an extension of that community with a few vestiges still hanging on today. 
> 
> • _Big Red One_ is worth the watch (it has Mark Hamill! In a non- Star Wars role!) but also check out director Sam Fuller’s WWII experiences, including shooting documentary footage of liberation of Falkenau, which would later be admitted as evidence during the Nuremberg trials. 
> 
> • Starting on Cortlandt St. in 1921, Radio Row was a six block neighborhood that became the world’s largest concentration of radio and electronics stores. These were demolished in 1966 to build the World Trade Center Plaza. My parents still think fondly of the area and agree with one interview subject in this [Radio Diaries story ](http://www.radiodiaries.org/radio-row/) that you sometimes went down there for “the adventure of being yelled at”.  
>   
> • Clint made Nat sit through a marathon of his favorite baseball movies a few years back. _The Sandlot_ , _A League of Their Own_ , and _Field of Dreams_ were included. Clint teared up during all of them. Nat only gave him a little shit for it. 
> 
> • I’m sure there are many books Natasha could be referencing but in my head I’m basing the book Fury gave her on _From Sea to Shining Sea: A Treasury of American Folklore and Folk Songs_ ed. by Amy L. Cohn, which remains one of my favorite childhood Christmas presents. 
> 
> • There are at least a dozen names for the will o’ the wisp in the British Isles alone; Jack o’ Lantern, fairy-fire, Spunkie or Pwca lights to name a few (The Irish Liam an tSoip, which translates as Willy or Will the Wisp, is surprisingly one of the more straightforward ones). Largely explained away nowadays by the discovery of bioluminescent forest organisms and the oxidation of swamp gases, these eerie lights were traditionally associated with either fairy creatures or the wandering spirits of the damned and the dead and ran the gamut from being mischievous to malevolent in their interactions with humans. They could function as death omens, tricksters or even guardians of buried treasures and are most famous though for leading unwary travelers astray from safe and well-known paths, often to unfortunate ends. However, on occasion they have also been known to guide the lost and stranded safely home. 
> 
> • The song Bucky quotes is _Ballad for Americans_ , from which this fic’s title is derived. This smash hit radio broadcast, first sung by Paul Robeson, aired for the first time on November 5th, 1939. In modern parlance, the song went viral and was so universally popular that it was sung at both the 1940 Republican and Communist Conventions. In one of his final campaign speeches of 1940, FDR quoted its lyrics. It’s populist, message, embracing of the diversity of the American experience, lead to it coming under fire during the post War, McCarthy era. I confess to having never heard of this song until this past winter when I listened to this [Radio Diaries story ](http://www.radiodiaries.org/ballad-for-americans/) Give it a listen, this song is pretty great.  
> 


End file.
